Based on this chart, electric car is a best way to burn calories
If you’re charging it with your own muscles, sure. Or you could just put rocks in your panniers.
The joke is that calorie is a unit of energy, and it’s the car that’s “burning the calories” instead of your body
This kills the
crab.
Maybe the most surprising thing here is that regular biking is still twice as efficient as e-biking even given our mediocre metabolic efficiency and a physique that isn’t exactly designed for the bicycling motion.
it also has the Ebike going ~40% faster which means almost twice as much friction to overcome.
Seems to be meaningful that all of the speeds should be the same.
To be meaningful, they should reflect the real-world imo. Which I they attempt to do? 18km/hr seems really slow for non-ebike (my last commute home by acoustic bike before I got an ebike was 27.0 km/hr), but I guess casual riders might go that speed?. If you use a class 3 ebike in the US, the ebike speed is also really slow (for class 1/2, its about right - I typically get 26km/hr). In Europe, speeds are typically less than the US for ebikes. And I think European urban speed limits tend to be less than US? Of course there’s also traffic, so there are times when cars average less speed than bikes. Depending on location and time of year, how intensely the AC/heater in the car is running may significantly impact traffic fuel efficiency. They could have just included a few different speeds for each option, I suppose.
If you want to apply it to CO2, you need to convert that energy into CO2, but that’s also really dependent on energy source. Coal power will be a lot worse than solar and wind. Typical US beef will be a lot worse than chicken or wheat or solar/wind energy. So, you would need a second chart and then do the calculations. For the average person whose ebike speed and acoustic bike speed are nearly the same, the ebike is better in terms of CO2. If someone gets specifically cleaner energy sources, then it would be a lot better. OTOH, someone connect to a grid that’s mostly fossil fuels, but eats a low-CO2-emitting diet, the acoustic bike might be slightly better.
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It makes sense to me…
For example if the the e-bike rider had to spend 1/5 of the energy of the unpowered cyclist (numbers chosen for the example’s sake) that would be 1.1Wh/km they exert.
The remaining 12.9Wh/km would be what was discharged from the battery while riding (from using pedal assist and/or throttle features). This can be measured when you charge it back up at the end of the trip to the previous level.
Really had to drop that car speed down to make a meaningful chart huh?
Wdym? The faster a car moves (or anything, not just a car) the less efficient it’s gonna be, because it has to fight against more and more wind resistance.
They’re saying that at highway speeds the cars energy usage would be off the chart, or if they scaled the chart to that usage, everything else would be too small to discern the differences.
You guys are in agreement.
Aaah, I get it now, thanks!
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Is this actually an empty comment or is something wrong with my client?
It’s empty for me too, fwiw. As is the other reply to you
The measure of productivity of transportation is distance traveled, not speed (unless this were some time race). Comparing kw/speed tells you nothing about the kWh used to make the same trip as alternative modes of transportation.
In theory I agree, in practice other stuff, as the need for heating/cooling, really muddled the theory and puts the sweet spot speed way up. And if we turn the Aircon off, 150 is a really high number.
Wdym? The faster a car moves (or anything, not just a car) the less efficient it’s gonna be, because it has to fight against more and more wind resistance.
That isn’t entirely true. At lower speeds there may be other inefficiencies that are worse than wind resistance (since wind resistance becomes negligible at low speeds).
It will depend on the vehicle, but for example, small gasoline cars are more efficient at ~70 km/h than at lower speeds. Electric vehicles will likely be more efficient at lower speeds (~40 km/h) than gas vehicles, due to (lack of) gearing but there will still be low speeds where they are less efficient than higher speeds.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ehicle-energy-economy-at-different-speeds_fig1_326822085
What would the energy usage be if all of them were going the same speed?
More importantly, the KWH used to go the same distance. Sure a car uses more power… It’s going faster, and gets to its destination faster, therefore using power for less time.
Energy is measured in KWH, people. But yeah, your point about normalizing to the same speed to make the comparison fair is good.
The graph is in Wh per Km, so it’s already measuring the energy per same distance.
It’s still inaccurate though. Even at (slow) highway speeds my Ioniq uses slightly less than 150wh per km, if I drove a constant speed of 45km/h I could easily hit under 80wh per km
Looks like trains are about 50wh/km
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-energy-efficient-mode-zero-emission-urban-transport-kmeť
I couldn’t find any info on planes, but that’d be interesting to see how massive that would be too.
It’s that normalized by passenger or is that just the train?
Normalized by passenger, certainly. However, it’s easier to hit passenger capacity in a train than in a (private) car.
Wait the private car isn’t normalized as 1 person per car or 1.2 average people per car?
Deeply suspicious framing if that’s the case.
You misunderstood me. For one, I simply assumed that locomotives have big engines for a reason and thus the number can’t be calculated for the entire train. For two, when I mentioned the capacity of cars, I meant maximum passenger capacity. I said that because at maximum passenger capacity, cars become a reasonable means of transportation whereas normally, they are ridiculously inefficient.
So if you just 4 people in an electric car then it beats a train? Huh
The 50 is normalized to passenger. I think it’s 30 per seat, but I guess they don’t fill all the seats usually.
Yeah, micro mobility is great on paper when you’re young and live in an accessible city with flat topography. Years ago I became (and still am) a bicycle commuter and I am ENTIRELY SICK OF IT. I want a fucking car. I am tired of biking in the rain and the snow and the cold. It fucking sucks.
Also If I didnt have the ability to purchase an e-bike recently I’d be fucked with the terrain of the place I am currently stuck living (and even that doesn’t quite cover the situation).
Also I am tired of minor injuries compounding year over year due to the simple fact that I am using my body as both the engine and support structure to move myself, vehicle and cargo around just to live.
It was fun 10 years ago but now I’m just like give me a fucking cargo van.
I’ve been telling everyone how most people don’t need a car in a big enough city (I’m in Europe), and how much more efficient (PROPER) public transport is.
…And then I get the work commute metro trains where stupid/inconsiderate/disgusting people still get on the packed train despite being sick, keep standing in my kidney and sneeze/cough at others (without a mask, of course) and sniff their nose all the way. Every single time when that happens I dream about having my own car where I don’t have to deal with this (or an idiot blasting TikTok from their speakers, being drunk+loud, smelly, etc.).
I still won’t have a car, but man, sometimes the right decision isn’t the easiest.
I live in a city with very good public transport which I use constantly. I also have an E-bike.
However, one needs to note that if I buy something big (extra lot of groceries, a new computer, a painting, anything that doesn’t fit in a backpack), using PT is pretty inconvenient. Especially when I’d be faster just carrying the thing home from Ikea, since I only live some 2km away, but the bus routes don’t go across the boroughs (but radially from the center outwards, with a few “lateral” buses), so I’d take two buses and it’d be some 10km. And if it’s raining and I have an item that shouldn’t get wet…
Also, taking a cat to the vet for instance.
I’m just waiting on when public transport will be supplemented with small city EV-s you can rent for a few hours cheaply. Like those e-scooters, but small cars, and with more regulations.
I know an apartment building which gives the tenants (mostly young students) the option to reserve and rent an EV for just a few euros an hour. And you don’t need to fill the tank, so it’s pretty nice.
Urban planning issue
No amount of urban planning can solve a 300 year old city built in a 10,000 year old hilly mess of a glacial valley.
ebikes with regenerative braking could do very well in that environment. Try taking a look at what’s within 15 minutes by bike
I know what’s 15 minutes away by bike because I bike everywhere I go. Doesn’t change the fact that I am sick of it.
Walk a bit. Take a bus. Buy an electric scooter. Move. All decent options
Busses barely provide any service where I live. Walking is useless because nothing is close enough for that to be a viable option. I have an electric scooter, it is useless because of the local terrain (and is just as shitty as biking as a means of transport anyway). And sure, yeah, just “move” because that is so simple to do.
Had a neighbour in his 80, had multiple leg operations and he still used to take a daily bike ride to keep fit. Not to mention that even if bike commutes suck, they improve your mental health considerably, even if you go in the rain/cold.
And most importantly of all, those who can take the bike cover those who can’t. So please enjoy your car ride, but take the bike when you can.
Do you personally commute by bike 100% of the time for literally every outing to get to work or run errands? Because I do, and have for a decade. I’m over it.
Also I am tired of minor injuries compounding year over year due to the simple fact that I am using my body as both the engine and support structure to move myself, vehicle and cargo around just to live.
I’m sorry you’re getting pushback and criticism for this. As someone who physically can’t bicycle and struggles with mobility, I strongly support well designed and well maintained walkable communities, bicycle infrastructure, and effective public transit. And I recognize that, for some people, the basic right to travel and work and generally function in society requires personal car ownership.
That doesn’t mean I sympathize much with people who live in subdivisions off major highways with no grocery stories within twenty miles - there shouldn’t be any community anywhere designed to require car ownership.
But I also don’t sympathize much with people who want to ban all personal vehicle ownership from their little 15 minute utopias. Disabled people exist.
I agree with this. Cities shouldn’t be car exclusive, but eliminating cars completely would also alienate villagers and people living in rural areas, in addition to disabled people.(written by an european who has family in those regions)
Preach it.
I am old enough where these sorts of points have much heavier weight. I can bike, but my body is not happy after any non-trivial distance.
I now have my eye on an electric recumbant trike. It solves all of my ergonomic (back) issues, and the electric would help with some of the terrain struggles and help me more accurately predict travel time. Plus, there’s a bit more storage for, e.g., a change of clothes for the destination. They’re damned expensive, though, even the cheapest.
Doesn’t solve the weather issue, but I’m sure someone makes a version that has a shell; at which point you’re essentially just driving around a small, slow, electric car with a lot of limitations.
I’m still going to replace my bike with a recumbent, though. My body just can’t handle that position for prolonged periods anymore.
I completely understand the weather thing. In the Netherlands it doesn’t get that cold, but the rain is really annoying (it rained basically non-stop from october till late february). In the city where I live however, there is also a pretty good bus service, so you can avoid cycling longer distances in the rain. For me I find cycling in good weather so good for my mental and physical health that I wouldn’t want to go without it.
You say an e-bike doesn’t quite do it for you, and I’m curious what you mean. Is it that it doesn’t have the range, that the engine isn’t strong enough for hills, or something else? I would love to learn about more disadvantages of micromobility, so I can create more nuanced opinions.
I used to live in Boston, which in recent years has become very bike friendly and is actually setup to make sense using a bike for primary transport (fairly robust public transit for the US, physically pretty small), but now I live in a city in Massachusetts where the area has very little bike infrastructure, and the landscape is hills and valleys of hundreds of feet of varied elevation every half mile or so. Using a non-electric bike for daily errands / transport would be equivalent to running a marathon every time I need to pop over to the grocery store. The e-bike battery and range runs out so fast that i’m basically limited to a single specific errand every time I go out—no option for doing more than one thing. Also add to the fact that everything is designed around cars so amenities are not blocks away, but rather towns away.
The northeastern United States sees basically every type of weather so there are days where it’s wonderful to be out on a bike and days were it is a complete nightmare—when you have to get on your bike to get to work when its raining sheets or 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) outside and there is no other option it becomes a wretched ordeal.
My point is, beyond a very specific set of circumstances where weather, health, topography, public transit infrastructure and also the immense luxury of even being able to live in a city all line up, using a bike as a primary mode of transportation is completely useless solution.
Sounds like it should keep you fit.
What kind of injuries?
The car is correctly represented, about 0.15 KWh / km is what one gets.
However, the positioning of the e-bike looks strange to me. I’ve looked at previous studies and the e-biker has always been first in efficiency - because the efficiency of a motor far exceeds the efficiency of human digestion and muscles, while weight and speed remain comparable to an ordinary cyclist.
I think someone has calculated food energy incorrectly, or assumed that e-bikes move faster than they do. :)
I guess it’s hard to gauge an e-bike since they often have a variety of operating modes ranging from progressively higher levels of pedal assist up to full throttle. But that’s fascinating to think that an all-electric ride may actual consume less energy in the grand scheme of things. I had never looked at it that way!
It is interesting, but remember we need food to live anyway, and we need exercise to stay healthy. If we ask used ebikes on max pedal assist to get around, but then go to the gym and pound the treadmill for an hour, what does that do to the numbers? Or if we eat less and burn less energy, but then lose bone density and need more healthcare as we age (just one effect among many of not getting enough exercise)?
Oh for sure, yeah. I have a sedentary office job, so the e-bike commute is my primary source of exercise (particularly after I quit the gym during the pandemic), so I tend to keep the pedal assist low and try to get a workout. There are exceptions though. Sometimes I’m just tired or sore, or it’s really hot with bad air outside, and I elect to go all electric on days like that. It’s nice to have the option!
I think many people peddle just as hard on an electric bike, so the 5.5 kWh/km is a given, the rest is the energy required to go faster. Since air resistance increases with the square of the speed, it might very well be the case that 14 kWh/km at 25 km/h is more efficient than what the human alone would need to deliver for the same speed.
Edit: I failed to take into account that for the human at the same level of effort the power remains constant, not the energy per kilometer. Going faster at the same power output would reduce the energy expenditure per kilometer for the human to about 4 kWh/km, which would indicate that 10 kWh/km is being delivered by the motor to go faster.
That being said, it might be the case that they just calculated the energy needed to move the bicycle without taking the energy efficiency of the digestive system into account.
I just did a quick of my statistics. My bike typically provides an average of 100W in my hilly 28km commute (both ways) that takes about 1h15 minutes. That’s less than 5Wh/km.
I’m using a fairly high setting, too, and judging by the fact that I don’t break a sweat at all, I’m 100% sure I’m not pedaling as hard as I do on a regular bike.
If my calculations are right, at that speed with the numbers from the graph, that would put the energy requirement at about 10 kWh/km. That means that with your motor delivering half of that, the human output actually matches up pretty well with the graph. I’m saying output, because I’m convinced that the graph doesn’t take the calories being burned into account and only shows the work being done to move the bicycle.
This would be much more efficient if it had other transportation as well.
Like non-electric cars, trains, subways, etc.
It’s not too hard to get their efficiency as well.
NEXT DAY EDIT: Should’ve looked, there’s actually a handy chart showing the energy efficiencies of a whole bunch of vehicles and modes of transport just straight up on Wikipedia. This article. Comparing the km/MJ column, we can see:
Walking 4.55
Velomobile with enclosed recumbent: 12.35 (there wasnt a figure for just regular biking)
Solar car: 14.93
Tesla Model 3: 1.76
General Motors EV1: 1.21
All combustion engines are below 1, but here’s a few:
VW Passat: 0.33 Cadillac CTS-V: 0.17 Renault Clio: 0.42
There’s a whole bunch of other stats though so I suggest checking the table
END EDIT
Also biking and walking are not necessarily even viable for certain commutes such as any over about 4 miles/ whatever that is in kilometers say 8, and anytime I need to carry heavy luggage / groceries. Or anytime anybody with mobility issues needs to travel.
It’s all very well insane if we wanted to buy an e-bike and get rid of their car but that’s not really practical.
The break-even distance in urban areas, where it takes the same amount of time to bike, is typically more like 7 miles. That’s about half of commutes. Not a 100% replacement for everybody, but big enough to make a meaningful difference.
<7km is too far to bike?
Oh man. Well, I agree on the other things you said, but… 6.4 km isn’t that much. It’s a fair bit, yeah, but not that much. With an e-bike, it’s not really even a thing. I chose to use the healthcare in the next city over (I live on the border of two cities) and I have about ~7km whenever I go there. 10-15 min with an ebike. With a regular one it’d be a chore, but it wouldn’t take much longer, 20-25 minutes maybe with a loose pace.
But yeah biking definitely can’t replace everything. I mean, cargo bikes exist, but still.
With mobility issues, we now have a lot of mobility “scooters” that go about 25km/h per the EU regulations. Like a super buffed up wheelchair. with a sort of chassis. Small enough to fit in the back of a taxi-van that has a disabled lift, but still quick enough to use in a similar way as a bike.
Still tho. I want my cheap rental ecars.
Bikes don’t have to replace everything to make a big difference. Something like “use them as the default choice for shorter distances” makes a big difference.
Oh definitely.
I would like to one day see one of those horrible American cities that you can’t even traverse on foot / bike, but I don’t want to step a foot in the US, with the whole fucked up corruption, military-industrial complex, and the whole budding protofascism.
While I like this chart, it’s useless without the tradeoff. It also needs to map speed to time spent. What is being given up for improved efficiency? The inflection point is how you move people from point A to point B.
The biggie is urban planning to ensure that people don’t need to travel huge distances on a routine basis. That means that people give up very little.
This should be shown in Km/Wh so the more efficient the modes of travel show as bigger bars.
yes, I thought it was backwards and was quite surprised
A lot of electric cars use that unit.
Well more like kW/100km
This data needs to be normalized by speed or realistic range/day. Otherwise it’s pretty meaningless.
It is totally pointless, I am totally on side of bikes and walkable cities, but this chart is pointless. What battery stores and what humans use is not comparable, and adding combustion engine car/bus/train here would throw the chart to totally other scale. Train has enough kWh to power a small town, but it carries shit ton of load.
Like most “fuck cars” memes it’s only relevant if you’re a young single person with no hobbies who never travels more than 5km from their home without taking public transport.
who never travels more than 5km from their home without taking public transport.
So 90% of all humans (excluding 'murica, I guess)
it’s only relevant if you’re a young single person
Literal bullshit. Are your legs made of styrofoam? If not, you can handle a little cycling.
Actually, in February I spent 22 hours on my mountain bike - I know you don’t care snd perhaps not a big deal but it’s a recent achievement in quite proud of.
Regardless, my comments are not about fitness. Young single people tend to have less commitments.
My partner and I have newborn twins. The only transport options are pram and car. We do have a bike trailer for them but it’s not really safe until they’re 1.
The same situation applies if you’re caring for an elderly parent. Which I am.
The way you assume it’s about fitness is kind of a “case in point” to be honest - you’re incapable of considering that others have different transport needs.
Why the hell are you taking newborns or elderly people in long commutes (and not using a train)?
I live in regional Australia. There are no passenger trains within about 5 hours drive.
The city I live in has about 50,000 people. I’m not in the middle of nowhere.
My parents do live in the middle of nowhere though, about an 150km from the nearest grocery store.
My circumstances aren’t that unusual really.
Now do one where you A) normalize this to the same trip distance (not speed, so that these choices for a single trip become meaningfull) and B) convert the kWh into CO2 emissions, including the emissions in growing and transporting the various power and food production methods used (coal to solar, locally produced veggies-air shipped beef)
It’s already normalized to distance, the graph is showing kWh/km. The site speed is just there for additional context.
Trip distance is dependent on methods of transportation at the aggregate level. That’s only relevant for policy decisions or collective actions, not individuals of course, but if we are going to deal with climate change, collective action is necessary.
Given the graph is normalized by km traveled, its overly generous to cars.
Yeah, if you account for the amount of CO2 that goes into producing food the ebike will be much more efficient in terms of co2/km than a regular bicycle. Even if you cheat by making the regular bicycle drive slower than the ebike, like they did for this chart.
Energy efficiency and carbon footprint are very different things - pretty sure the carbon footprint of 15 big macs (8500kcal) is substantially greater than 1L of gasoline (let alone an electric grid equivalent)
A quick googling tells me a burger is about 3kg of CO2 equivalents. 1L of gas seems to be about 2,5kg.
Now if you were to eat local and seasonal food I’d guess you can get more efficient than burning oil.
Edit: As @bjorney correctly pointed out a quick google in the morning, before the brain functions properly kick in, isn’t the best way to produce comments on numbers. I did NOT account for the factor of about 15 that a burger needs to get close the energy stored in a liter of gasoline.
Edit to the edit: Just out of curiosity I did another quick google (please brain, be functioning now) and it seems that to get 8500kcal from oats you need about 2,5kg. This seems to produce about 1kg of co2 equivalents. I am certain that this does not include the amount of co2 the human is expelling in excess by using their muscles instead of a motor, so the whole discussion is probably moot anyways.
that’s one burger, you would need at least a dozen burgers (14.2 big macs) to match a liter of gasoline (8340 kcal)
Damn, my brain got way to happy about the numbers being so close that I completely overlooked that. I’m gonna defend myself by saying that this was early in the morning ;)
Edited my original comment to reflect this fact.
lol all good - I posted some napkin math above - https://lemmy.ca/comment/7747680
Long story short this figure is just all around bad because it’s conflating energy efficiency with environmental friendliness.
Electric vehicles, despite being greener, are probably less efficient (which is why ICEs are mysteriously absent from this figure), it takes a lot more watts of power to move a 5000 pound car than it does a 2000 pound one). Similar story with biking - based on my Garmin figures, biking is about 22x more energy efficient than driving an ICE car, but the carbon footprint of that energy source is much higher watt-for-watt, so if you eat a meat heavy diet, the bike is barely greener than driving (caveat: I didn’t amortize the footprint of constructing the car, which is a probably a huge deal - if cycling is actually an option for you, your mileage probably isn’t that high).
Granted - you are spot on with oats, if you pick a greener crop like corn you are down to 0.5kg carbon per 1L of gasoline equivalent - as the guy below wrote, biking is a “greener choice” if you are vegan (3-6x less carbon footprint), but at the end of the day, manual transportation is a thing people choose for health or pleasure reasons, or when the distance is so low that other methods don’t make sense. if you are going to try and shame people into doing it out of a sense of environmental responsibility, you shouldn’t need to use dubious math to accomplish that end
In this regard, a vegan cyclist is going to beat out anyone in a car.
Interesting. I’ve never owned an electric car, but just guesstimating based on those numbers, my daily commute would cost something like 25 cents in electricity. Not too shabby.
I did buy an ebike a few years back and watched to see how much the bill went up, but frankly never noticed any change. At 2 cents per day, it’s basically a rounding error relative to other electrical usage, so that makes sense to me now.
Where’s the gas car on here? How about steam locomotive?
If I’ve got to go 300+ miles through the US I’m probably not going on foot or by human power.
If you need to travel that distance, take a fucking train.
Lol. Sounds good. My little brother lives in Birmingham, AL and I live in West Lafayette, IN. My sister lives in Fishers, IN and my in-laws are at one of the northernmost suburbs of chicago. I invite you to propose me travel solutions for my wife and two children under 5 which are better than my electric car.
For reference:
West lafayette to Birmingham: 875 km
West Lafayette to Fishers: 112 km
West Lafayette to North of chicago: 260 km
I would LOVE to take the train or bike or walk. But I think people like you and OP might be underestimating the hostility toward (and unavailability of) public transit in the US outside of Metro areas. I appreciate that there are better answers than my electric car, but it’s better than getting in my double wide and double tall diesel truck, no?
Thanks a lot for linking the source!
you’re welcome. It’s something I try to do routinely.
